Author: Ophelia Benson

A follow-up of sorts to my colleague’s Comment on Crooked Timber. Bush’s monopoly seems to be broken for the moment; the Timberites are discussing Beslan and Islamophobia and Islamophobiaphobia. Somewhat heatedly, as a matter of fact.

There is a thread on ‘Al Qaeda in Beslan?’ for instance, and another on the horror itself which kicked up an interesting comment by Dsquared:

I think that ‘Islamism’ is a politically convenient but fictional construct drawn up by people who want to drag their own pet Middle Eastern issue into the fight against Al-Quaeda.

Ah. Fictional construct. Really. Do the people in, say, Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Turkey, etc etc, who are damn well terrified of Islamists, think ‘Islamism’ is a fictional construct? I don’t think so. Didn’t Islamists in fact kill one or two people in Algeria? Don’t Islamists want to impose Sharia everywhere they can? Is that a fictional construct? It doesn’t seem particularly fictional to me. Once again I have to wonder why some people think it’s in any way progressive or respectful to side with an intensely reactionary, regressive, coercive, anti-egalitarian movment, against its progressive, secular, egalitarian, rights-defending opponents.

So then Chris posted on Yusuf al-Qaradawi – and the fur started to fly.

Harry of Harry’s Place says what I would have said if he hadn’t (except I probably wouldn’t have said it as well):

If Juan Cole says it then it must be ok to criticise al-Qaradawi now? It appears that for Chris everyone else who pointed out al -Qaradawi’s reactionary views on a whole range of issues at the time of the British visit had some other agenda which nullified the value of the information they put forward.

Just so. Then Dsquared answered:

To put it bluntly (without presuming to speak for Chris) yes. Juan Cole has a very good record as a straight-shooter in these matters. At the time of Qaradawi visit to London, it seemed quite likely that he was a loon, which is why you’ll find no ringing endorsement of him on CT, but the claque screaming for him to be denounced from the rooftops seemed so bloody appalling (and was so chock full of people who had axes to grind and seemed unconcerned about distorting the truth while grinding them) that I for one was reluctant to join it. It strikes me that this is an entirely sensible approach to subjects where one doesn’t have much knowledge; to trust the judgement of those who have proved trustworthy in the past, and ignore those who haven’t, however loud they scream.

Then Harry answered that:

Well that is simply pathetic Dan. I have read multiple sources on al-Qaradawi, including the original source material of his fatwas (easily avaliable in English on his own Islamonline website). It was not at all difficult to make ones mind up about what kind of views he held. But you have to wait for an endorsment from some American academic before you can make a judgement. Pathetic but not at all surprising.

And so on – but you can read it yourself, obviously. It’s just that I’m naturally interested, because this difference of opinion is very like the one we had over Marc Mulholland’s post a few weeks ago, here, here, here, here, here, and here. People do disagree about this. Strongly. I wish people who hesitate to criticize the likes of al-Qaradawi were more aware of groups like the ones I linked to in connection with the demo today, and the one that issued that Manifesto. I wish they would side with groups like that – groups that are for equality for women and secularism, and against homophobia and anti-Semitism – rather than with groups like Fans of al-Qaradawi. I wish they would wake up and realize what it is they’re supporting, in short.

As OB suggested below, it’s been a pretty awful time lately. And it goes without saying that Russia today is just appalling.

Admittedly I should have known better, but I decided to check out what the folk (with apologies to Dubya) at Crooked Timber made of all the horror this week.

Guess what, as far as I can tell – and despite their combined IQ of 213 – they have absolutely nothing to say on these matters. Not a squeak.

So what are they talking about?

Something about ITunes – though I’m too limited to understand a word of it.

Something about George Bush.

Ah, Rousseau. Cool.

Some blindingly obvious stuff about Durkheim. Oh no, it’s really about George Bush.

More about George Bush, but with a staggeringly pretentious title.

Oh look, George Bush again.

Ah, Kerry this time. If only, it actually turns out to be about… Dick Cheney. Variation on a theme. Very good.

Gay republicans. (I tried to think of a way that this was about George Bush, but failed. Damn!)

This one’s about copyright. But somehow it starts off by saying that Republicans are dismayingly insane!

Something about the Enlightenment. By the Rousseau fella. Obviously, he hasn’t caught whatever obsessional illness his colleagues are suffering from.

George Bush, kind of.

George Bush.

Speaker of the House. (Is that George Bush?)

George Bush.

I’m bored now. Okay, this is very childish. But there’s a serious point here. I can’t find a single mention of the murder of the Nepalese hostages, exploding Russian jets, hundreds taken hostage in Russian schools. Of course, people are entitled to their own interests. But not one mention… that I can find. (I did get bored looking!)

I’d like to finish this by quoting someone from Panda’s Thumb (well from their comments section). They’re talking about mass murder.

I was a professor for 12 years. You are fighting a losing battle. Stalin
killed millions. Mao killed millions. Pol Pot killed a million or so. But the
majority of academics will apologize for them. Why? Because most academics and
most professors are pretty darn stupid. It’s that simple.

But thank you for helping me remember why I hate academia—for there are times when I am tempted to go back.

Pretty darn stupid. He’s got that right.

Just a little more Harding – because the previous visits with her are on the August page, which no one will ever look at again, and because at least one reader thinks I may be giving her the straw man treatment. But in fact I’m making her sound better than she is rather than worse, because as I mentioned it simply is impossible to convey how feeble her arguments are via brief quotations. Brief quotations don’t, for instance, and can’t of their nature, make clear how absent any evidence is. They also can’t convey the cumulative effect of her writing, which is genuinely credulity-strainingly childish. Brief quotation for instance misses out how often she repeats the identical inane phrases, but that repetition combined with inanity is a big part of why her work makes such a bizarre impression. It’s like ‘The Dick and Jane Book of How to Know Stuff.’ The meaningless phrase ‘from the perspective of women’s lives’ is repeated multiple times on a single page, even in a single paragraph. The phrase itself is meaningless (lives don’t have perspectives); what Harding means by it (standpoint epistemology) is nonsense; and the endless iteration of meaningless nonsense does not make it more convincing, to put it mildly. But mere short quotations can’t illustrate that endless iteration; so the impression I give is actually better than the one she gives. Ironic, ain’t it.

Here’s some good stuff:

But from the perspective of groups that society excludes and marginalizes, this now conventional claim that all knowers should be interchangeable can appear to have certain antidemocratic consequences. If all knowers are interchangeable, then affirmative action in the sciences can be ‘only’ a moral and political agenda. It can have no possible positive consequences for the content or logic of the natural sciences; the scientific work of men and women, blacks and whites, Nazis and Ku Klux Klanners will be equally supervised and disciplined by scientific method. If all knowers are in principle interchangeable, then white, Western, economically privileged, heterosexual men can produce knowledge at least as good as anyone else can.

Fascinating, isn’t it? And lest you think she’s just describing reality there – she begins the next paragraph with the phrase ‘Even worse…’ No, these are the ‘antidemocratic consequences’ she’s talking about. Apparently she thinks it would be more prodemocratic if, say, the scientific work of women (white ones? ‘economically privileged’? Western? who knows) were ‘supervised and disciplined by scientific method’ in some way other than ‘equally’ with that of men or Nazis. (Well what about Nazi women? Huh? How do we figure all these items out? How does a rich Nazi gay male compare with a poor Western heterosexual female KKKer? Do they get points for each item and then we add them all up and figure out how to supervise and discipline their work? Or what?) Interesting notion. What would that way be, exactly? What other way is there to supervise and discipline scientific work? I would really like to know, but of course Harding does not in fact say. She never does. And that again is what it’s impossible to show by mere excerpt. You’re at liberty to assume that she in fact does say, farther down the page or into the chapter, and I just haven’t bothered to quote that bit. But no. She doesn’t. She just sets up these ridiculous pseudo-‘problems’ and then wanders off and talks about something else. She doesn’t even think through her own claims, or notice the glaring contradictions they’re full of.

So there’s no straw here; it’s all pure solid brick.

And then as soon as I posted that, I found this rather inspiring Manifesto at Jonathan Derbyshire’s blog. And the thing is…it seems to me that people in the US and the UK who side with the pro-hijab side against the ban don’t quite realize the extent to which they’re siding against people like those who wrote that Manifesto. Against people like Azam Kamguian and Maryam Namazie and Ibn Warraq. People who are not arrogant Westerners, not Eurocentric, not colonialists, not Orientalists, not hegemonists keen to trample on the Other, but people who want to get rid of the regressive, punitive, subordinating aspects of their own cultures, just as we all want to get rid of those aspects in our own. I wish Western liberals would pay less attention to pro-hijab protests and more to things like this Manifesto and the Bulletin of the Committee to Defend
Women’s Rights in the Middle East and Ibn Warraq’s Secular Islam site. They’re the ones who need and deserve support.

Damn – it’s one of those days. Horrible sectarian fights breeding violence everywhere you look. What a disgusting world. Schoolchildren and teachers held hostage by Chechen rebels, mosques burned and people injured in Nepal after a group of Nepalese workers are murdered by Islamic militants, two French journalists held hostage by more Islamic militants and threatened with death because of a French law against wearing conspicuous religious symbols in schools. It’s hard not to think that a good deal more secularism would be a helpful vitamin for a lot of people.

It pains me to say it but I don’t agree with Normblog on this issue. At least, not with the way he states it. I think it’s reasonable to disagree about the ban, because there clearly are irreconcilable tensions in it. It feels like a violation of rights, an interference with basic freedom, to both sides. But I think it’s less reasonable to come down on one side or the other by denying those tensions. So I don’t think this is right: ‘The law forbidding it is an unjust and illiberal one, preventing people from affirming their identity in ways that don’t harm others.’ But there is a claim that the presence of the hijab in the classroom does harm others. That’s the whole point. So it’s too easy just to say that it doesn’t.

No doubt I err in the other direction. But I do at least realize that people who want to wear the nasty thing (now stop that) feel unfairly treated.

I do think the hijab a nasty thing though. Very. So I do think that talking about ‘preventing people from affirming their identity’ is a too-emollient way of referring to it. If some people wanted to wear slave-chains, or signs proclaiming them Untouchables, or yellow stars or striped concentration camp uniforms to school, should that be called ‘affirming their identity,’ especially when people in the same ‘group’ found that very identity-affirmation profoundly degrading and subordinating? The whole problem with the hijab is that it does far more than merely affirm the ‘identity’ of the person who wears it. To some extent that’s potentially true of any clothes. I have to say, I’m damn glad that I went to school in the 19th century so that I didn’t have to be surrounded with girls poking their stomachs and buttocks out of their pants all day. They look stupid and kind of pathetic, and I think I would have felt stupid and pathetic by association. (Therefore I think school dress codes are a good thing on the whole, and that is after all all the French law is – a school dress code.) But it’s more true of the hijab because of its history, especially its recent history – because of its connection with Islamism and violence against women. That’s one reason it’s not an exact equivalent of crosses – because people don’t get beaten for not wearing crosses (as far as I know anyway). Furthermore, both sexes wear crosses. They’re just not a badge of subordination in the way the hijab is (even though of course a lot of Muslim women don’t see the hijab as a badge of subordination – but on the other hand a lot do).

I damn well hope those two journalists don’t get murdered as a result of the law though. But no doubt they will. That seems to be the way things fall out these days.

The rest of it…

September

August

July

June

May

April

March

February

January 2003

December 2002

November

October

Just trying something out, here…

July

June

May

April

March

February

January 2004

December 2003

November

October